I left the next day. Waiting with the other passengers on the platform for the train to arrive I noticed the different postures of anticipation — the whites habitually stood, looking watchful, facing inwards in little family groups, surrounding their luggage; the blacks lounged on the benches in pairs, looking relaxed, their legs extended; the rest, the mixed race people, the uitlanders, foreigners, Indians, seemed to keep moving, circulating warily among the others.
Because of security, steel fences divided the platform, and only travelers Could get past this barrier.
‘Not like this in Australia,’ said a stocky white man, heaving his bag Bob, traveling with his wife, Sylvia, both of them about fifty and rueful. And years ago you could see your family off. It was friendly. None of this security. None of these fences.’
‘Different in Australia,’ Sylvia said.
They were Johannesburgers born and bred but within eight months would be emigrating to Brisbane and planned never again to return to South Africa. ‘It’s just too horrible, what’s happened here,’ Bob said, in that complex South African way of saying ‘here’, yeueah. He was a factory worker, hoping to find employment in Australia, though would he? His trade was the fabrication of railway ties — cement and wooden ‘sleepers.’ Not much call for those in Oz.
An African approached me, singling me out of a large group of waiting travelers, and said, ‘Mr Theroux?’
No one ever mispronounced my name in South Africa, because Leroux was a common name and the place was full of the descendants of French Huguenots.
‘How did you know it was me?’
‘I’m the steward. After a while on this job you get to know people by sight. I can usually fit a name to a face.’
That was Craig. He escorted me to my compartment, and explained the features — hot shower next door, bar in the next coach, reading area and lounge. Pinky, a Zulu woman in a smart uniform, would take my drink order. Lunch would be served in an hour in the dining car.
The train whistle blew two sour notes, and with a yank on the couplings that sounded like an anvil clang, we pulled out of the station and headed west. I sat in perfect contentment and watched the city pass the windows. The long shadows of big buildings were replaced by the brighter suburbs, the garages, the fast food outlets, the supermarkets, the squat fenced-in bungalows, and the one-man businesses that characterized small settlements, Mohammed’s Meat Market, Solly’s New and Used Hardware, Dave’s Deals for Wheels, Prinsloo’s Panelbeating. If there were no people in sight I would have taken these lifeless and antiquated Edwardian terraces and arcades to be Australian, for they showed the same turn-of-the-century colonial architecture, bungalows of hot stucco, with gingerbread trimming, and tin roofs, even the same hardy shrubbery, bright-eyed lantana bushes and peeling, droopy eucalyptus trees. Farther out, the small industries, meat packers, rubber tire warehouses, cement, scrap metal, soap: they actually made things here.
Sixty or so miles out of Johannesburg we passed an enormous graveyard at Tshiawelo, Avalon Cemetery. Two heroes of the struggle were buried here, Joe Slovo and Helen Joseph. But all I saw were muddy slopes and fields, without either trees or grass, just crude graves. Each grave was surrounded by an iron cage, like a baby’s crib made of rusty uprights and steel mesh, to keep the digging animals out, dogs, hyenas, ferrets, whatever. In different parts of the graveyard, funerals were in progress, people praying, or standing near newly dug holes, in the posture of mourners, no one standing straight, everyone somewhat crook-legged and bowed in crippled attitudes of grief.
At Roodepoort a little later, in the dining car, George the waiter was serving me pan-fried Cape salmon fillets, while a whole platform of waiting, luggage-carrying Africans burdened with bales, baskets, crates and blanket rolls, looked in at me — or were they looking at the African family of four at the table behind me, being served by the jolly white waiter?
The towns here were small and orderly, most of them built in the shadow of mine workings, rows of houses on the main street, a school, a church, a rugby field, low hills and fields beyond, Mayberry in the goldfields, among mine dumps that looked like hills. Some of these towns looked as though they had been built to last. The station at Krugersdorp, with corbels and finials and severe Cape Dutch ornaments, had been built in 1899, the date carved high on its cupola. At the edge of town there were simple solid uncomfortable looking miners’ huts and miners’ hostels, also a century old and still inhabited, and partly hidden by billboards saying Please Condomise and Thank You for Condomising.
In even the whitest town on the veldt there was a reminder of less fortunate Africa — a ragged man walking up a path, an old man on a bike, a woman balancing a bulging bale on her head, an amazing bird on a post, African huts, barefoot kids, tin privies, squalor, cornfields. And the place I took to be an armed camp — high chain-link fence, razor wire, guard dogs, spotlights on poles — turned out to be the perimeter of a country club, the area that looked like a training ground for recruits, just a golf course.
We came to Potchefstroom. I remembered the name from a story a Venda man named William had told me in Johannesburg. He had grown up in Pietersburg in what had been the Northern Transvaal and had gone to a black school there.
‘It was just a country school,’ he said. ‘I was very young and didn’t know anything. But one day we took the train to Potchefstroom to play another school at football. After the game we were so hungry! We walked to a restaurant. We saw white people inside, but they wouldn’t let us in. They said, “Go to the window.” Beside the restaurant was the window where we were served.’
I told him that this arrangement was common in the American South up to the 1960s.
William said, ‘Here it was take-away for black people and sit-down for white people. We didn’t get angry. That was the situation. We got used to it, but that was my first experience of “Go to the window.” I never sat in a restaurant. Even now — true — I don’t know how to use a restaurant. You need money, yes, but you also have to know what to do when you get inside. I don’t feel comfortable.’
The signs Slebs blankes, Whites Only, persisted into the late 1980s. I asked William whether he had children.
He said he did, two girls, sixteen and thirteen. ‘My kids know how to use restaurants. They have no idea of what life was like before. I haven’t told them yet. I will tell them when they are twenty-one. But they won’t believe me. They think it’s nothing to go into a cinema or a restaurant or a hotel. When I was young we had no idea. We were afraid. Or white areas — we didn’t go. We didn’t hate whites. We were frightened of them. They were so hard.’
I asked him to give me an example of this fear.
He said, ‘About 1981, I was still a teenager, working for Mr Longman. I went to Durban with him, for a job. When we got there they wouldn’t let me into the hotel. He was a carpenter, on a job there. I was his assistant. He said to the hotel people, “I will pay for his room.” But they said no. They wouldn’t let me in. So I slept in the car. After a few days, Mr Longman found me a place to stay at the church. You think my kids would believe that?’
The name Potchefstroom had jogged my memory of his story.
Klerksdorp was the first big station on the line. An English-sounding man in the corridor said to me, ‘This is Terreblanche territory’ — meaning that it was fiercely white still; not just verkramp, unbending, but far-right neo-fascist. Eugene Terreblanche, a bearded demagogue in his late fifties, was the white separatist leader of the AWB, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), a rump of unrepentantly racist Boers that were based in Ventersdorp. He was now in prison serving a sentence for assaulting (and paralyzing) one black man and for the attempted murder of another. Depending on who you asked, Terreblanche was either the Afrikaner Moses or a hard-drinking womanizer and embezzler.